Since the merchandise service life decreases recently due to a variety of merchandise items, and customization service orientation of consumers who use the Internet strengthens, the necessity of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and one-to-one marketing has received a great deal of attention. These methods aim at increasing the customer satisfaction and winning and networking new customers.
The one-to-one marketing is a kind of database marketing. Personal attribute information such as the age, sex, hobby, taste, and purchase log of each customer is stored as a database. The contents of the information are analyzed, and a proposal that meets customer's needs is presented. A typical method is variable print. Along with the recent progress in DTP (DeskTop Publishing) technology and the spread of digital printers, variable print systems have been developed, which customize and output a document for each customer. Such a system is required to optimally lay out and display contents in information quantity that changes for each customer.
In a conventional variable print system, containers (also called field regions in a document form) are laid out on a document as regions where pieces of information are displayed. A database and the containers are associated with each other to achieve layout display.
However, each container serving as a partial display region in which a text or image is to be pasted has a fixed size. For this reason, when data in the database is inserted in the container, and the data amount is larger than the container size, text overlap or image clipping occurs. If the data amount is smaller than the container size, a space is formed in the container. In either case, optimum layout display corresponding to the information amount of a text or image to be displayed cannot be implemented.
To solve this problem, automatic layout systems which change the container size in accordance with the information amount have been proposed. An automatic layout system can flexibly set the container size of a text or image. Some automatic layout systems can set a variable container size and increase the container size in accordance with the amount of data to be inserted. In another technique, if text data larger than a fixed container size is inserted, the font size of the text is reduced to display the entire text in the container.
Another automatic layout technique to solve these problems is disclosed in the layout design apparatus described in patent reference 1, in which when the size of a container increases, the size of an adjacent container is decreased.
As described above, some conventional variable print systems can change layout frames (containers) dynamically in accordance with content sizes to appropriately lay out contents having different sizes.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-48216 also describes a technique of laying out a plurality of piece of merchandise information in a document of one page. In this method, before a merchandise catalog for each customer is created, the layout of a piece of merchandise information (e.g., the name, image, and specifications of a merchandise item) is defined in advance as a master merchandise file, and a region where the master merchandise file can be laid out is defined on a document. The contents of each merchandise information extracted from the database are laid out in accordance with the master merchandise file, and merchandise files after layout are inserted in the document from the upper left to the lower right.
However, the method of simply inserting master merchandise files in which the contents of the database are laid out into a document, as described in patent reference 1, has no concept “record” or “multirecord”. Pieces of merchandise information in the database are laid out in accordance with master merchandise files and sequentially laid out in the document. The layout order or size of each record cannot be adjusted on the basis of the intention of the user. For this reason, when, e.g., direct mail is created in accordance with the taste of each customer, the design is monotonous. Even when the user wants to create a more effective design by laying out items focusing on those which should be most preferred by the customer, the intention of the user cannot be reflected on determining the layout or size of each record.